Former Democratic National Committee Chair and longtime Democrat party activist Donna Brazile has apparently just lowered the proverbial boom on Hillary Rodham Clinton in her new book, an excerpt of which appeared Thursday in Politico, and it is stunning.
Brazile not only appears to throw Clinton under the bus, but along with her goes Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz. The excerpt is not simply riveting, it is devastating. It portrays a party left in financial tatters by Barack Obama and turned into a money machine for the Clinton campaign.
And in the process, according to Brazile’s narrative, Sen. Bernie Sanders was essentially left standing on the platform after the train had departed.
The book, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump in the White House, will be released Nov. 7 – ironically on election day – and it already raising eyebrows. Here’s a quote from the Politico excerpt:
“Officials from Hillary’s campaign had taken a look at the DNC’s books. Obama left the party $24 million in debt—$15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign—and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for America (the campaign) and the Hillary Victory Fund (its joint fundraising vehicle with the DNC) had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the party on an allowance.”
Brazile apparently doesn’t think much of Wasserman Schultz’s management capabilities, either. According to the excerpt in Politico, “Debbie was not a good manager. She hadn’t been very interested in controlling the party—she let Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn do as it desired so she didn’t have to inform the party officers how bad the situation was.”
At least twice in the Politico excerpt, Brazile uses the term “cancer” for what she says she discovered when going through DNC records. And she said this:
“Right around the time of the convention, the leaked emails revealed Hillary’s campaign was grabbing money from the state parties for its own purposes, leaving the states with very little to support down-ballot races.”
Brazile’s book officially goes on the shelves while President Trump is in Asia. It underscores what appears to be a civil war within the Democratic Party, something that the New York Post’s John Podhoretz clearly thinks will help heal the party. Writing in the newspaper, Podhoretz puts it bluntly, and perhaps brutally:
“Brazile has done her party a service because this honest account of the maneuverings of the Clinton campaign is a necessary step for Democrats in determining how to gauge their own organizational and ideological health.
“This is long overdue. Rather than try to figure out how they contributed themselves to their calamitous 2016 fate, they have spent a year indulging the fantasy that they really won the election and had it stolen from them.
“Stolen by Russian ads on Facebook. Stolen by ‘collusion,’ whatever that might be. Stolen by racism. In other words, they were robbed and the only thing that matters now is catching and jailing the robber.
“Sorry, fellas. The 2016 election was the culmination, not the beginning, of a Democratic implosion.”
It is the stuff of political train wrecks. If the book delivers on the promise of its title, it may force the true believers within the party – the Clinton faithful who think it’s all a “vast right wing conspiracy” – to come to terms with their own denial. Are there enough grief counselors in America to deal with that?
